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What is SIERRA? See What is SIERRA?
Why should you use SIERRA? See Why SIERRA?
To install SIERRA (requires python 3.8+):
pip3 install sierra-research
To get started using SIERRA, see getting started.
Want to cite SIERRA? See Citing.
Have an issue using SIERRA? See Troubleshooting.
SIERRA architecture, organized by pipeline stage. Stages are listed left to right, and an approximate joint architectural/functional stack is top to bottom for each stage. “...” indicates areas where SIERRA is designed via plugins to be easily extensible. “Host machine” indicates the machine SIERRA was invoked on.
SIERRA is a command line tool and plugin framework for:
- Automating R&D, providing faculties for seamless experiment generation, execution, and results processing.
- Accelerating R&D cycles by allowing researchers/developers to focus on the “science” aspects: developing new things and designing experiments to test them.
- Improving the reproducibility of scientific research, particularly in AI.
SIERRA changes the paradigm of the engineering tasks researchers must perform from manual and procedural to declarative and automated. That is, from:
"I need to perform these steps to run the experiment, process the data and generate the graphs I want."
to:
"OK SIERRA: Here is the environment and simulator/agent platform(s) I want to use, the deliverables I want to generate, and the data I want to appear on them for my research query--GO!"
Essentially, SIERRA handles the “engineering” parts of research on the backend, acting as a compiler of sorts, turning research queries into executable objects by generating experiments, configuring execution environments or platforms, running the generated experiments, and processing experimental results to generate statistics, and/or visualizations. It also handles random seeds, algorithm stochasticity, and other low-level details.
It eliminates manual reconfiguration of experiments across simulator/agent platforms by decoupling the concepts of execution environment and target platform; any supported pair can be selected in a mix-and-match fashion (see SIERRA Support Matrix). Thus, it removes the need for throw-away scripts for data processing and deliverable generation.
SIERRA can be used with code written in any language; only bindings must be written in python.
SIERRA has a rich model framework allowing you to run arbitrary models, generate data, and plot it on the same figure as empirical results--automatically.
Its deeply modular architecture makes it easy to customize for the needs of a specific project.
Not sure if SIERRA makes sense for your research? Check out some of the `use cases<https://sierra.readthedocs.io/en/master/src/use-cases.html>`_ for which SIERRA was designed. If aspects of any sound familiar, then there is a strong chance SIERRA could help you! SIERRA is well documented--see the SIERRA docs to get started.
SIERRA supports multiple platforms which you can write code to target. In SIERRA terminology, a platform is a "thing" (usually a simulator or real hardware) that you want to write to code to run on. Note that platform != OS, in SIERRA terminology. If a SIERRA platform runs on a given OS, then SIERRA supports doing so; if it does not, then SIERRA does not. For example, SIERRA does not support running ARGoS on windows, because ARGoS does not support windows.
SIERRA supports multiple execution environments for execution of experiments, such as High Performance Computing (HPC) environments and real robots.
SIERRA also supports multiple formats for experimental inputs and outputs.
The complete set of built-in plugins which come with SIERRA are here. SIERRA supports full mix-and-match between plugins from the table above--this is one of its most powerful features! While SIERRA itself supports arbitrary sets of plugins, there are necessarily restrictions on which plugins can be used together. For example, if you are using a platform mapping to a custom in-house simulator which takes JSON as input, you can't use the XML plugin for experimental inputs.
The basic requirements are:
- Recent OSX (tested with 13+) or Linux (tested with ubuntu 20.04+).
- python >= 3.8.
Note
Windows is not supported currently. Not because it can't be supported, but because there are not currently any platform plugins that which work on windows. That is, SIERRA's OS support is dictated by the OS support of its current platform plugins, none of which support windows.
If windows support would be helpful for your intended usage of SIERRA, please get in touch with me--SIERRA is written in pure python and can definitely be made to work on windows.
For more details, including the requirements for project code, see the SIERRA requirements.
If you use SIERRA and have found it helpful, please cite the following paper:
@inproceedings{Harwell2022a-SIERRA,
author = {Harwell, John and Lowmanstone, London and Gini, Maria},
title = {SIERRA: A Modular Framework for Research Automation},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9781450392136},
publisher = {International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems},
pages = {1905–1907}
}
You can also cite the specific version of SIERRA used with the DOI at the top of this page, to help facilitate reproducibility.
If you have problems using SIERRA, please open an issue or post in the Github forum and I'll be happy to help you work through it.
I welcome all types of contributions, no matter how large or how small, and if you have an idea, I'm happy to talk about it at any point :-). See here for the general procedure.